Rashada Dawan with Emma Sipora Tyler + Tyler Symone in Caroline, or Change at Firebrand Theatre, directed by Lili-Anne Brown PHOTO MARISA KM
KIMBERLY | Like they do for generations. LILI-ANNE | Whatever era is 1990 to 2020, that 30-year period for me was distinct in Chicago theatre, especially in storefront. There was the House and the Hypocrites. KIMBERLY SENIOR | Bailiwick Chicago. LILI-ANNE | Jackalope came to be. My theatre company, Bailiwick Chicago, came and went. A lot of theatre companies came and went. We had Oracle, we had the changeover and then death of ATC [American Theatre Company]. I could go on, right? KIMBERLY | I moved to Chicago in ’95, and thought, “There’s 150 theatre companies here at any given time.” How many companies have I seen come and go, and now there are new ones that I’m so psyched about. Even with the ever-changing nature of the landscape, the soil is fertile. LILI-ANNE | I think of that era as being so influential. Martha [Lavey, of Steppenwolf],
20 SDC JOURNAL | FALL 2025
Bob [Falls, of Goodman Theatre], Barbara [Gaines, of Chicago Shakespeare Theater]. Those were the titans I was looking at. And then I think about the small companies that were coming up. These kids are in a fucking house all living together on Honore with this stage in the backyard that is maybe going to fall down at any given moment. Which is also part of how I met Ike Holter. I remember that the first time I went to the Inconvenience [a community of interdisciplinary artists, where Holter is a member], I left 10 minutes later because I was like, “Who are these kids?”
If you’re doing musicals, first of all, you spend most of your life commuting. At least in my era as an actor, all the large-scale musical theatre was out in the suburbs, which is why those of us at Bailiwick Chicago and these other companies were trying to bring musical theatre to the city. We thought it was crazy that everything was Mamma Mia! or Oliver! We were like, “But I want to see some dark thing that Michael John LaChiusa wrote.” There were dozens of musicals that had never been to Chicago. It was as if, if there wasn’t a Broadway tour, they weren’t worth doing.
KIMBERLY | They’re younger than we are.
This could be where we start segueing into talking about commercial theatre versus non, because I’ve been thinking about and talking about that a lot lately. I had to check in yesterday with the Walder Foundation, it was the one-year mark of my award.
LILI-ANNE | I’m not cool. I felt really weird and out of place, and he kept inviting me. He didn’t care that I just was a dork. This is what I’m talking about with community. I had come in as a musical theatre person, and I will say the community can be extremely segregated—but it’s not on purpose. Everybody thinks their world is the world because theatre is your life.
KIMBERLY | You were an inaugural recipient of the Walder Foundation’s Platform Awards, a three-year grant that provides unrestricted support for performing